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Tenzin Forder, a 1st grade student at Urban Montessori in Oakland, protested inaction on climate change at a local solidarity march of the weekly, youth-led, international Fridays for Future climate strikes at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park in Berkeley on March 15. (Dylan Bouscher/Bay Area News Group)

Overreacting to climate
change is not possible

In Michael Peercy’s letter to the editor in the Mercury News on April 5 “Climate change overreaction is a bigger man-made threat,” he argues against overreacting to the climate change threat. I don’t think it is possible to overreact to this.

Yes, we do have the Paris Accords, which is hopeful. But even if nations were to achieve Paris goals, temperatures would probably still crash through a 2 degrees Centigrade increase, an increase that our grandchildren will deem unacceptable given the expenses, probably in the 10s or 100s of trillions of dollars to repair for increased damages from wildfires, floods, hurricanes, migrations of people to climate-friendlier parts of the earth, etc. We are about 3 decades behind in our reaction to this, the largest threat ever caused by mankind on this earth. Are we now overreacting? I don’t think so. It is still perfectly legal to buy an auto that belches a pound or more of CO2 for every mile driven.

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